A good thing about America is that while the "politics" lag behind citizens and US companies try at least to solve partially the problem. I liked these bits: Google encrypted the backhaul communications between their data centers to prevent passive monitoring. Apple was the first forward with an FDE-by-default smartphone (kudos!) We often denigrate US and his biggest companies like: Apple, Google or Microsoft. So I a…
Companies won't solve the problem, because the problem is in a different domain. "Our data" may be sort of safe, but the civil rights are being eroded, which is a much bigger issue. Having such powerful entities living in complete independence from the government, and with complete unaccountability, is a social disaster. Besides, the data owned by a user in the more "immediate" sense, may be sort of safe, but don't f…
I think this is an interesting question, because it intersects with the rise and fall of the nation state - at some point (perhaps that point has already been reached) corporations will have greater reach and greater power than nation states and individuals will start to feel less allegiance to the state of their birth. Will they start to look to companies to protect their rights?
I disagree that laws which govern a nation state are the right level for this sort of issue or that nation states are more trustworthy - those are precisely the laws which have been subverted and used against us in order to subvert encryption of websites, sim cards or any of our other communications and allow recording of it all. Just as one example of how easily our laws are subverted the man in charge of supervising UK surveillance can be bought for a few thousand pounds for trivial matters:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/feb/23/mp-malcolm-r...
International law is even worse. Even with the relatively good accountability and civil rights in the US (for most citizens most of the time), the US government has arrogated the right to kill you without trial, detain you indefinitely without trial, or torture you without legal recourse because to give you legal recourse would endanger state secrets. Such is the state of our civil rights - they are selectively applied and withdrawn by the state as it suits them, and words like traitor or terrorist are used to put someone beyond the pale of civilisation and therefore outlaw.
Here is what Snowden had to say about it on that AMA:
How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights.
I agree with that - what is effective is moral certitudes which individuals agree and act upon, not nation state law or international law which are so easily ignored or subverted. That means technical solutions, not legal ones, though I agree it is better to rely on neither the nation state nor the corporation in proposing solutions.